Ecosystems Curriculum

Section 1: Resources

A Forest Food Web

How is this food web different from food webs that you typically see?

This food web below emphasizes populations by illustrating more than one of each type of organism. Most food webs depict one organism to represent the population. However, this may exacerbate a difficulty that students already have. Students tend to focus on the fate of individual animals rather than populations.⁵ So when looking at a food web diagram, they are unlikely to realize that the one animal represented really stands for a whole population of animals. This food web attempts to make it clear that the interactions are between whole populations. Click to download forest food web (PDF 515 KB)